Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  The atmosphere in Victoria Park was actually anything but chaotic, a memorial service rather than a political rally, a tearful celebration of martyrdom more than a cry for action. Blood, real spilled blood, as well as metaphorical blood, in the sense of ethnic kinship, set the tone. A local artist, Andy Kwong, had doused the Pillar of Shame with two buckets of red paint, after mixing it with his own blood. This, he explained, symbolized the blood of the students who had died in Beijing. He was arrested but soon released on HK$1,000 bail. (Not long before that, an artist from mainland China had expressed his anti-colonial sentiments by flinging a pot of red paint at the bust of Queen Victoria located in the same park. Hong Kong people criticized this as an act of vandalism or, worse, as deeply passé: Queen Victoria was no longer a hateful symbol; British colonialism was now beside the point.)

  The main speaker among the politicians and activists onstage, magnified on the video screen, was a bespectacled man in his late sixties, a rousing Cantonese orator and Democratic Party legislator, Szeto Wah. He wore a white T-shirt that displayed the words DON’T FORGET in large Chinese characters. Szeto speaks little English, unlike most of his colleagues in the democratic camp. They are mostly middle-class lawyers and other professionals; he is a former teacher and union man, a “man of the people.” Szeto knows how to work a Hong Kong crowd. It was Szeto Wah who, in 1989, founded the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China. Ten years later he lit the flame of remembrance, squinted at the Pillar of Shame, and said, or rather, declaimed in the manner of an official mourner: “Do you hear our cries? May your heroic souls descend here—the only piece of Chinese soil where we can gather to remember you in public.”

  The crowd did not shout or cheer, but was quiet, quite unlike the frenzied crowds I had seen in Taiwan. This was typical of Hong Kong, people said: Cantonese with British restraint. Perhaps that was it. But people also looked genuinely sad. Some were in tears. The candles softly swayed. This was a solemn occasion. I was reminded of another date, which marked my childhood in the Netherlands: May 4, Commemoration of the War Dead. During the day, our teachers talked about the war. At six o’clock, the entire country would come to a standstill for a minute of silence (and woe betide the hapless German tourist who kept on talking or driving). Church bells would ring all over Holland. And a procession would set off for that quiet place in the dunes, near The Hague, where members of the Resistance were taken to be shot by the Germans. Shared remembrance of suffering, of heroes and enemies, pulled the nation together in a ceremonial moment of patriotism, dignified but also sentimental. It is during such moments that tribal feelings stir.

  There is something of that feeling in the yearly remembrance of Tiananmen in Hong Kong. It is when “Hong Kong people” or “Hong Kong Chinese” tell pollsters that they feel most “Chinese.” Memories of that particular martyrdom forged the main emotional link between the former British colony and the Chinese mainland. The notion that Hong Kong is “the only piece of Chinese soil” where the bloodshed can be remembered in public makes for a bitter pride. It means that Hong Kong is not a mere colonial appendage, despised as a gaudy marketplace, dedicated to nothing but horse racing, nightclubs, and the pursuit of wealth. Hong Kong, the city of refugees from Chinese tyranny, is also part of China, the freest part, where people still have the dignity of free speech if not a fully democratic system.

  Szeto Wah had one other thing up his sleeve, one more ceremonial link between Hong Kong and the rest of the Chinese world, a patriotic link in time instead of space. Wang Dan, the former student leader in Tiananmen Square, had been invited to speak in Hong Kong on this occasion. But the Hong Kong government decided not to grant him a visa. So he would speak via satellite from San Francisco, known to Chinese as Old Gold Mountain. As his image was projected on a video screen his mother, the historian Wang Lingyun, would speak from Beijing on a cell phone, since her own phone had been disconnected by the authorities at 5 P.M.

  “The good mother and the good son,” announced Szeto Wah in sonorous Mandarin. Once they had all been hooked up, the Old Gold Mountain, the former British colony, and the capital of the Chinese empire, Szeto Wah invited the good son to speak to his good mother. But Wang Dan, a man of northern-Chinese reserve, was shy of such mawkish gestures and said he would prefer to speak to his mother in private. Instead, on this occasion, he told the Hong Kong crowd to remember that “the dead have paved the way for democracy.” And his mother asked “the younger generations” to “have a sense of historical commitment and social responsibility. They should all pursue democracy, freedom, and learn well.”

  It was banal, perhaps, and a little gimmicky, and yet moving too. Most modern nation-states have been founded on myths of martyrdom and bloodshed for freedom. So it has been with the modern Chinese states, built on the foundations of one the oldest nations in the world. Communist China has its myths of martyrdom; so did Taiwan under the Nationalists; and so does Taiwan under the Democratic People’s Party today. A democratic China recalling the myth of 1989 is yet to be born. But it is the hope of that China which moves the people who gather each year on June 4 in Hong Kong. The descendants of Chinese refugees, who are still shielded by a fortified border from the Chinese state of which they are officially a part, are the patriots of a China that as yet exists only in the mind.

  The shipping tycoon who replaced the British colonial governors told these people to forget about the past. He likes to make speeches about traditional Chinese values. Like Lee Kuan Yew, a leader he much admires, Tung Chee-hwa is a believer in “Asian values.” Chinese patriotic pride is often invoked to bolster his shaky credentials (he was essentially handpicked by Beijing). But remembering what happened in 1989, openly, truthfully, is the one thing that makes many people in Hong Kong feel proud to be Chinese. That is why people lay wreaths every year at the foot of the Pillar of Shame, bowing three times out of respect to the “martyrs,” while he, their governor, would rather that damn thing disappeared from sight forever.

  Two days after the ten-year anniversary of Tiananmen, an article appeared in the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s main English-language paper. PILLAR OF SHAME SPLITS CAMPUS said the headline. The split was between students and university authorities. After the official ceremonies on June 4 were over, four hundred students of Hong Kong University returned with the Pillar, which they proceeded to put up on campus. The university’s External Affairs Office protested that this “unauthorized move” was “a danger to public safety,” and it reserved the right “to take appropriate action to remove the statue. . . .” The students, in language no less wooden, but inspired by nobler sentiments8, declared: “We are of the view that the students’ decision to have a long-term erection of the sculpture was made in accordance with a complete democratic mechanism.”

  The poor Pillar had actually been on an odyssey ever since the Danish sculptor donated it to Hong Kong in 1997. First it was displayed at Chinese University, then transferred to another college, and then to six other universities, but no one wished to be responsible for giving it a permanent home. A request in 1998 to place it among other sculptures in Kowloon Park was rejected by the municipal committee, because it was of “poor artistic value.” This judgment, not in itself absurd, might have carried more weight if other public sculptures in Hong Kong had been of greater merit. Another official took the view that only works by local artists would be acceptable. Democrats protested. There were heated public meetings. The Provisional Urban Council Committee referred further discussion to the government’s Recreation Committee. Pending a decision, moves were made to put the Pillar in the New Territories, a newly urbanized area north of Kowloon. But protests from local villagers put a stop to that. Bad feng shui, some claimed. Too politically sensitive, said others. And so the Pillar was passed around, ferried from place to place, without reaching a final destination. The last I heard, it was languishing in a remote container park, somewhere in the New Territories. Tsang Kin-sing, a spokesma
n for the Hong Kong Alliance of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China, called the lack of a permanent place for the Pillar “the sorrow of Chinese.”

  In Hong Kong, the June 4 anniversary of Tiananmen signifies a kind of Chinese unity, but it is the unity of dissidents, democrats, and citizens who value their freedom, not of governments. The patriotism of this imaginary China, celebrated in Victoria Park, is the antithesis of the official patriotism promoted by the Communist government. And yet a closer look at the staging of the event shows subtle fissures running through the ranks of the unofficial patriots. For some of the most famous democratic politicians in Hong Kong, such as Emily Lau, the feisty leader of the Frontier Party, are nowhere to be seen. And the most famous democratic politician of all, Martin Lee, does not appear with his Democratic Party colleagues onstage but sits among the people, facing the stage, albeit in the front row. He is there, but not, as they say, in “an official capacity”; involved, sympathetic, but at an angle, away from the center.

  Lee and Lau, and others like them, well-traveled, fluent in English, many of them educated in Britain and America, could be described as Hong Kong patriots. Pan-Chinese patriotism, inspired by a shared sense of national humiliation and the martyrology of 1989 or the 1937 Nanking Massacre by the Japanese is not what drives them. In the spring of 1999, dignified, lawyerly Martin Lee, as leader of the Democratic Party, had to march through the streets in a headband to protest the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, but he looked uncomfortable, as though he would rather not have been there at all (yet he had to be, lest he be branded “anti-Chinese”). When right-wing Japanese politicians deny Japanese wartime atrocities, as they sometimes do, Lee is not given to venting his rage.

  It is not that he doesn’t care about the Japanese war record; his father fought the Japanese as one of Chiang Kai-shek’s generals. General Li was a Chinese patriot, who refused to register his son Martin’s birth in Hong Kong lest he be classified as a British citizen. When the Japanese invaded, Li’s children were smuggled to Guangzhou in baskets, carried across the border by coolies. Nor is Martin Lee indifferent to what happened in Tiananmen Square. He led the Hong Kong protest demonstrations in 1989. But he would prefer Hong Kong to be left alone as a fully democratic, sovereign city-state ruled by law. He does not want to be governed from Beijing any more than from London. Hong Kong may have been better off as a crown colony of democratic Britain, but it would be better off still if it were independent like Taiwan.

  Hong Kong was never like Taiwan, however, and even less like Singapore. Taiwan was split between the heirs of the Chinese republic and the former subjects of the Japanese empire, while Hong Kong was in some respects the successor of old Shanghai, that glittering den of thieves, businessmen, and dreamers, shielded by Western colonial privileges and legal institutions from the harsh authority of the Chinese state. Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s was not a democracy, to be sure, but there were other freedoms—economic, social, intellectual, and artistic—that allowed Chinese to flourish. Shanghai was the conduit for modern ideas, from Europe or the United States, sometimes via Japan. The indistinct outline of a modern China, commercially vibrant, intellectually on fire, inspired by Marx, Chaplin, Lu Xun, Tagore, Spencer, Mill, Hu Shih, and John Dewey, a China of contending literary magazines, lively newspapers, American movies, jazz music, horse racing, and public libraries, a China, in short, that was crushed on the mainland but whose pale shadows lingered on in Hong Kong, first took shape in Shanghai. The key to these freedoms was a degree of legal protection.

  The topography of Hong Kong shows marked similarities to that of Shanghai. On one side of the bay is Kowloon, the “Chinese city” as it were, much of it a frenzied souk of tenements and street markets, brothels and gambling parlors, teahouses and short-time hotels, and crowds, endless, teeming, buzzing crowds, which fill the narrow streets and neon-lit boulevards day and night. On the other side is the more sedate, more “Western” business district, called Central, a bit like the Bund in Shanghai, with its banks and law firms, its solid, neoclassical Legislative Council building, and its cluster of skyscrapers all vying for attention, one more sleek and wondrous than the other, some upholstered in the gaudiest shades of gold, like towering blocks of bullion. Old Shanghai department stores, such as Wing On and Sincere, still thrive in Hong Kong, as do such purveyors of Western luxuries as Lane Crawford. English and American books are still sold at the old Shanghai firm of Kelly and Walsh. The culture of Hong Kong, the source of its energy, is the amalgam of East and West, just as it was in old Shanghai. The difference is that Shanghai was not only the cosmopolitan center of Chinese intellectual life but a city in China, attracting people from all over the country, while Hong Kong was a British colony, cut off from China and populated mostly by refugees, or children of refugees, most of whom were Cantonese. Patriotism in such a place could only be a vexed affair.

  John Sham, the Hong Kong show-business entrepreneur now living in Taipei, was right. Hong Kong is the most westernized part of China, and Martin Lee is a typical product of it. But Western influence, too, has never been straightforward. Hong Kong has some highly skilled fakers of European luxury items. I used to know a man who went from office to office selling almost perfect imitations of Swiss watches. You could tell that the fine Rolex he held in his hand was fake only when you had opened it up to examine the Japanese-made mechanism. Political institutions never pretended to be replicas of Westminster, yet they too were enveloped in make-believe. Even though British governers ruled with almost absolute power, the issues of the day were debated in a Westminster-type legislature, of which no member, until the last few years of British rule, was directly elected. Jan Morris caught the atmosphere of the colony nicely in her book Hong Kong, where she described the British legislators9 (there were Chinese, too) as “able but sufficiently ordinary Britons, to be encountered, one might think, any day on a stockbrokers’ commuter train into Waterloo, transformed into Honourable Ministers on the other side of the globe.” What Hong Kong had, then, was a kind of spectacle of democracy without democracy itself.

  And yet the British did build a framework upon which a democracy could be built, a relatively free press, and a legal system, which, however imperfect in practice, was still based on the principle that the rule of law applied equally to all. The same system was handed down to Singapore but was undermined by Singaporean politicians almost as soon as the British left. In Shanghai it was crushed altogether. Martin Lee’s mission, carried out with an almost religious passion, is to prevent this from happening in Hong Kong.

  He has been accused by Beijing, and by his enemies in Hong Kong, of being both a “radical” and a “pro-British” colonial and thus, by implication, “unpatriotic,” even “anti-Chinese.” He is in fact much more complicated. When the British still ruled Hong Kong, Lee was not really a dissident in any philosophical sense. He did not disagree with the British ideal of liberal government and free commerce. He was, if anything, a conservative. But he wanted the substance, not the show. While most of his fellow members of the colonial elite, the “Sirs” and “Dames,” who sat in appointed councils and committees and showed off their finery in the glossy magazines, knew how to work the colonial system to their own advantage, Lee wanted what almost none of them, whether British or Chinese, had in mind: a real democracy in Hong Kong. For he knew that once Beijing took over, civil liberties and the rule of law would be impossible to safeguard without it.

  Martin Lee is not an easy man to interview. Not that he is unfriendly, difficult to meet, or unwilling to offer a good quote. Quite the contrary. He is unfailingly courteous and eager to offer his views. But he is also a traditional British-style barrister, with the dry manner and rather pedantic diction of his calling or, given his school education, a Jesuit priest. That is why he has always looked ill at ease in street rallies, in T-shirts and headbands, trying to be a man of the people. A tall, thin, somewhat owlish man, born in 1938, Lee looks more comfortable in his customary dark
gray double-breasted suits. He can be a precise and persuasive guide to the intricacies of Hong Kong’s constitutional arrangements. One always comes away from his neat, wood-paneled law firm with a better understanding of the Basic Law (Hong Kong’s new constitution), the struggles over the Court of Final Appeal, and the vital importance of maintaining an independent judiciary. But he is not one to put his passion on display.

  If Hong Kong had remained a British colony, Lee might never have become involved in politics at all. He had a successful law practice, made “more money than I needed,” and was a settled member of the Hong Kong elite. He, too, appeared in the social pages of the Hong Kong glossies, at this ball or that function, in formal evening dress. Until the early 1980s, there was no reason for him to be interested in politics. He might even have believed, as did most of the local elite, that politics was not suited to Hong Kong, that stability was the thing, that Chinese people were too immature and too excitable to be trusted with democratic rights, and that, in any case, since they lacked a democratic tradition, they were not interested in politics. What changed his mind, around 1982, was the looming threat of being ruled by Beijing. He noticed that many of his friends were now talking about getting foreign passports. Refuge in Britain or Canada would have been a soft option for Lee as well; an easy escape was one of the perks of privilege in Hong Kong. But somehow this didn’t feel right. He describes it as a guilty conscience.